Wherever you are, one way you must to celebrate World Chocolate Day (September 7th) is to find chocolate that was not made in your country. I'm posting this a few days ahead of the fun food holiday so you can find some. I found some from an Australian company called Arnott's when I had a Kroger Freebie for buy one get one free of these TimTam cookies. A couple of months later, the same freebie offer happened again so I ended up trying both varieties for free. I got the two varieties (Original and Caramel) that our local Kroger has but there are five different varieties of TimTam out there. We'll look at the two varieties I was able to find today, but first, a bit of background for the "TimTam" brand. The bakery was founded by William Arnot in Newcastle, NSW, back in 1865 The TimTam biscuit was named after an American racehorse that Ross Arnott saw win a race in 1958 but it was inspired by Penguin biscuit in the UK and "improved upon" by Ian Norris, the Arnott Director of Food Technology.
Original TimTam is basically layers of chocolate wafers, filling, and coating. While these include cocoa butter and chocolate liquor but these only come in at numbers 5 and 6 on the ingredient list below sugar, wheat flour, vegetable oils (including palm, by the way), and milk powder. Oddly there are 11 cookies in this package... I triple checked my count, there are 11 cookies in a pack. Two of these equals a serving of 190 calories and weigh 1.3 oz (37 grams) for a total of 7 ounces in a package.. I don't always put in the weight of the items we review but you'll see why I've done this in the next paragraph. These have a light brown color and when you examine them you see two wafers with a filling. These are not thin wafers but really more like cookies, they are crunchy! The chocolate is very sweet but it does have a chocolatey flavor just not as much as I'd hoped.
Caramel TimTam is very similar to the original -- layers of chocolate cookies, filling, caramel, and coating. In this case, the cocoa butter and chocolate liquor are numbers 12 and 13 on the ingredients list. Only 9 cookies in this package compared to the originals 11 cookies. The packages were the same price so you are correct that you are getting fewer cookies. This isn't unusual because it does require more ingredients to add in the caramel. However, two Caramel TimTams weigh 1.4 oz or 39 grams so they are slightly larger but overall you are getting less because all these cookies only weighs6.2 ounces total. These cookies are as crunchy but that crunch is mitigated by the stickiness of the carmel. These are much sweeter with a buttery tang from the caramel. The chocolate is lighter in flavor with a stronger creamy essence. The color is even lighter. I definitely like the Original variety better.
Which country's chocolate will you try on September 7th? Leave a comment and let me know!
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By the way, International Chocolate Day is actually September 13th. World Chocolate Day is July 7th, so perhaps you got the days interchanged. In any event, I think you and I love to celebrate chocolate any day of the week. Enjoy!
On The Chocolate Cult we cover all types of chocolate -- candy, pure chocolate, ice cream, paper made from cacao bean shells, etc. As long as it as something from the cocoa tree or is about chocolate or used in chocolate in some fashion, we'll cover it here.
I hope others will share some more stories. I know we have readers from Australia!
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